Mark your calendar!
Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: Classic & Contemporary Bengali Movies from Tollywood!
Bird & Beckett goes to the movies… at the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco’s Richmond District… March 16-20
Before there was Bollywood, there was Tollywood! Named for the Tollygunge neighborhood of Kolkata (Calcutta) in which most of the Bengali-language movie production offices are based, Tollywood has long been the proving ground of many talents later usurped, exploited and made rich & famous by the Mumbai-based Bollywood machine.
At our Balboa Theatre blowout, we’ll cast a huge klieg light on “Nagmoti” — a film from the early 1980s by the now legendary musician, ethnomusicologist and filmmaker Gautam Chattopadhyay. This dramatic feature film, set in a community of gypsies in the Ganges river delta southeast of Kolkata, won the Silver Lotus award at the National Film Awards, India’s equivalent of the Oscars. We’ll show it in a 35mm print that’s been in the keeping of the director’s brother ever since Gautam’s untimely death in 1999. Accompanying the Nagmoti screenings will be live performances by “Bengal and Beyond,” a band that fuses Bengali music and American jazz, led by bassist Bishu Chatterjee (a regular on the Bird & Beckett stage) with carnatic saxophone master Prasant Radhakrishnan. Back in the 1970s in Kolkata, Bishu played drums and cello in his brother Gautam’s trailblazing folk-rock unit called Mohiner Ghoraguli.
Along with Nagmoti, we’ll show a number of contemporary and classic Bengali-language films– and we’re hoping against hope to present “Aparjita Tumi,” the brand new feature film by award-winning director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury. Aparajita Tumi stars the No. 1 Bengali actor Prosenjit and was shot last summer entirely on location in the Bay Area, including key scenes in your favorite neighborhood bookshop, Bird & Beckett, and your favorite “great little place to eat,” Higher Grounds. Aparajita Tumi premiered in Kolkata in January, and your own favorite bookshop proprietor was there on the scene to soak up the glamor! In the next week we should know whether the producers are game to let us take a peak before it makes the rounds of the world’s film festival circuit.
So brush up your Bengali… or clean up your reading glasses for the subtitles… and make your way to the Balboa Theatre in mid-March for what promises to be a very big show!
The Chuck Peterson Quintet with vocalist Dorothy Lefkovits!
